Dean Smith

Add this to the list of things you can say about Bob Knight: Nobody has ever won more Division I men's basketball games. Knight matched Dean Smith's record of 879 victories when Texas Tech beat Bucknell, 72-60, on Saturday. Knight's first chance to own the top spot all by his sweater-wearing self comes Thursday night at home against Nevada Las Vegas.

On March 19, 1977, with 22 seconds left in the NCAA East Regional championship game, Dean Smith ran 75 feet down the basketball floor. The North Carolina coach had seen Kentucky's big man, Rick Robey, use his forearms to knock down Carolina's little guard, John Kuester. Robey's foul was purposeful. Losing 75-72, Kentucky's only chance at victory was to get the ball after Carolina missed free throws.

After 31 seasons at North Carolina, Coach Dean Smith has built an impressive record. His only losing season (8-9) was his first, in 1961-62. "He took the blame, but we didn't have a lot of talent," former player Jim Hudock said Wednesday from his home in Kinston, N.C. Hudock recalled Smith's debut on Dec. 2, 1961, against Virginia. Smith had told the players to raise a fist when they were tired and wanted to rest.

For the second time in three years, fate is pitting Kansas Coach Roy Williams against his revered friend and former boss, North Carolina Coach Dean Smith, in college basketball's showcase event. Saturday in New Orleans, as they did in 1991 in Indianapolis, Kansas and North Carolina will meet in the first of two NCAA semifinal games. Williams, who served a 10-year apprenticeship under Smith before coming to Kansas in 1989, disliked all the hoopla then and seems to dislike it now even more.

Dean Smith is another of those grown men who makes a living teaching grown-up boys how to bounce a ball, and because of this gets treated like a living legend. When a 21,444-seat arena was built in North Carolina for $38 million, it was named for Smith and decorated with a large black bust of his likeness, as if he were Julius Caesar or Abraham Lincoln and not some guy who spends his weekends worrying about how to score more points in a basketball game than Wake Forest does.

Tom FitzGerald in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Some college football crowds may be loud enough to raise the dead. The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff wants to do it literally. "It wants to build a $75-million stadium on a site that includes part of a cemetery. As many as 50 graves will have to be moved." Comment: Opponents might be wary of scheduling Pine Bluff on Halloween.

You bet, Dean Smith and Bill Guthridge were inseparable for the last three decades. Best friends, basketball brethren, Papa Tar Heel and his sardonic sidekick. "Kind of like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy," Guthridge cracked in a self-deprecating reference to the old dummy puppet act before a luncheon crowd here Wednesday before peering out into the audience and dryly adding: "Oh, I guess a lot of you are too young to even remember that."

What: "The World According to Dean." Author: Barry Jacobs. Publisher: Total Sports. Price: $11.95. What's that? You say you were transferred to the West Coast from North Carolina and can't find any reading on Tar Heel basketball? This one's for you. Just about everything Dean Smith has said about anything is here. No plot points to grapple with, just a couple hundred quotes, strung together in a book by Jacobs, who covers the Atlantic Coast Conference for the New York Times.